Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to lack a grasp of basic details of the hack that led to WikiLeaks publishing the Democratic National Committee’s emails, and WikiLeaks said Friday that “Clapper gets literally everything wrong.”

“In April, Russia used a third party ‘cut-out’ to send more than 19,000 DNC emails and more than 8,000 documents to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, attempting to cover its tracks and to give WikiLeaks some degree of deniability in knowing the source of the leaks,” Clapper wrote in his new book “

DNC CEO Amy Dacey learned of the breach in late April and brought in the private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. But CrowdStrike’s presence did not stop the flow, and the majority of the emails weren’t even written, much less stolen, until after the company was already on the scene. Most of the emails were written between May 5 and May 25.

The DNC declined to give its server to the FBI as evidence, and the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community relied in part on CrowdStrike’s private analysis to form its conclusions about the hack — despite the company taking weeks to stem the bleeding.

WikiLeaks’ Friday response to Clapper mentions “sources,” meaning there were likely more than one. It also refers to “published” emails, whereas Clapper referred to emails being “sent” to WikiLeaks. It’s possible that, if Clapper’s statement is accurate, there could have been more emails sent in April that WikiLeaks did not publish or that there was another source Clapper monitored but was not the origin of what WikiLeaks ultimately published.

Clapper basically wrote a book full of fake
news and got called out by Wikileaks. What are your thoughts?